Inverting microfiche negatives

My university’s library has issues of many older journals currently only available on microfiche, which are 4×6″ sheets of film used to store analogue copies of pages. These sheets are highly compact and durable (if you ignore the fact that film is quite flammable) and while they sort of look messy, they tend to preserve contrast well and thus are quite readable.

When I request a paper available on microfiche, the librarian uses a machine which scans the microfiche and generates a PDF. Unfortunately, the resulting PDF is a negative of the text, which I find slightly difficult to read. Thus I have been using UNIX tools to invert the negative into a positive image. One solution that works is based on the widely-available ImageMagick. For instance, the following command does this at 300 DPI without any loss of quality:

magick -density 300 input.pdf -negate -quality 100 output.pdf

Just sharing in case this is useful for anyone else.

Sonority sequencing is a zombie

In the last few years, I have seen a number of talks and papers which tested for an effect of sonority sequencing on various phenomena, either synchronic or diachronic. Without exception, I think all these studies found a null effect, but in each case I was struck by how conciliatory and uncritical the author(s) were of the idea that sonority sequencing exists in the first place, given that they failed to find any effect of sonority sequencing in a domain where they expected to find one. I submit that the sonority sequencing principle is something of a zombie idea, a bad idea that just keeps coming back.

The idea of sonority itself is over a century old, but it has proved extremely difficult to ground in any physical reality or to provide a precise, generalizable definition of what exactly it is. This is probably because it doesn’t exist. At best, the construct we are trying to measure may be some kind of perceptual salience, which is weakly correlated with sound change (and thus with synchronic phonological processes which arise from sound change), but which is highly contextual and just one of many contingencies governing sound change.

The idea that sonority is a scale (properly, a ratio measurement in the sense of Stevens) is itself decades old as well, and gives rise to the idea that grammars constrain the differences in sonority between adjacent phones in specific ways, as in the principle of sonority sequencing. If we focus our attention on languages that permit tautosyllabic consonant clusters of any sort, I have yet to see a single case where syllable phonotactics are cleanly described by imposing thresholds on this principle. In nearly every case I have seen—Turkish is a famous example—there are many systematic gaps which cannot be explained with reference to sonority or to any other known cause beyond historical contingency (e.g., in Turkish, the absence of coda *[rn], *[lm] despite their favorable sonority profile). In such cases, I see no reason to give any credit to the sonority sequencing principle.

Sometimes, theoretical progress involves not just the introduction of good new ideas, but also the rejection of old, bad ideas. I think sonority is one of those old, bad ideas, and I think phonologists should view it with a much more critical lens than they currently do.

Why we armchair

In the last two years or so I have gradually transitioned away from experimental-behavioral and computational work towards a larger proportion of what used to be called “pencil-and-paper” research: the development of theories, formalisms, and analyses. (“Description” also is pencil-and-paper in the relevant sense, but I am not really trained as a descriptive linguist.) While there are several reasons for this, one is the rather poor state of science funding in US, which suggest that we may be entering a moneyball era for linguistics.

When describing or presenting my pencil-and-paper work on phonology and its interfaces with morphology (which, to be fair, is mostly done on my trusty desktop computer, and which is sometimes quantitative), a few colleagues have suggested that I ought to be doing fine-grained acoustic or articulatory phonetics instead. I find this suggestion vexing. Consider something like my analysis of Spanish “raising verbs” in Gorman & Reiss (in press), which in turn is used to illustrate a series of formal-theoretical proposals under the umbrella of the theory of Logical Phonology. What could phonetic analysis contribute to this discussion? It’s obvious that, e.g., p[i]do ‘I ask’ has the same surface vowel as in v[i]ivo ‘I live’ whereas p[e]dir ‘to ask’ has a different surface vowel, one that is the same as the surface vowel in sum[e]rgir ‘to submerge’. There are of course are subtle differences betwene renditions and speakers, but there’s no reason to think those differences are relevant to the analysis of raising verbs. Anyone reading this is welcome to show that I’m wrong, but I for one think it’d be a waste of time to so much as check.

Similarly, a few colleagues have suggested that I ought to be doing human subjects experiments to figure out how such things (i.e., Spanish raising verb alternations) work. I again find this vexing. Now one can do a wug-test, and people have, but it’s not really clear what one gains from this, since we don’t have an agreed-upon linking hypothesis. Indeed, the most likely hypothesis is that adults are using a mix of task models, some of which might be relevant to our account of raising verbs, but some of which surely aren’t. How any of this might link up to the relevant linguistic notions like underspecification, morphophonological rules, suppletion, etc.—whatever you think the relevant notions might be—is unknown. A colleague thought the task ought to be some kind of online processing experiment, exploiting an unspoken form of what we might call a “derivational theory of complexity”, a totally discredited idea from before I was born. Similar issues plague neuroimaging work. The sorts of things that we can instrument in the brain at present—single-neuron firing rates as measured by single-cell recordings, magnetic current in boxes of 50,000 or so neurons as measured by MEG, blood oxygen levels in boxes of million or so neurons as measured by fMRI, the smeared electrical currents measured by EEG, and so on—simply do not match the “grain size” of the linguistic constructs we are interested in (Poeppel & Embick 2005): a single neuron is almost surely too small to store a “raising rule” (whatever sort of thing that is), and a fMRI voxel far, far too large.

I am happy to have phonetician, experimental linguist, and neurolinguist colleagues, I just think that it’s sort of their j-o-b to figure out how to translate interesting linguistic ideas into something their tools can test, and I somewhat resent the implication that I am leaving hanging any phonetic or experimental low-hanging fruit. In those rare cases where I myself have ideas that I think can be tested using phonetic analysis or human-subjects experiments with clear linking hypotheses, I do phonetic analysis or human-subjects experiments. Indeed, the august National Science Foundation has even funded some of these experiments. But most of the time, I don’t—we don’t—and so I theorize, formalize, or analyze instead.

References

Gorman, K. and Reiss, C. In press. Metaphony in Substance-Free Logical Phonology. Phonology to appear.

Poeppel, D. and Embick, D. 2005. Defining the relation between linguistics and neuroscience. In Cutler, A. (ed.), Twenty-First Century Psycholinguistics: Four Cornerstones, pages 103-118. Routledge.

Italian palatalization

In his Phonology of Italian, Krämer (2009:§4.2.1) is interested in the productivity of velar palatlization before /i/-initial suffixes, such as the masculine noun plural /-i/. Palatalization obtains in, for example, in amico-amici [aˈmiːko, aˈmiːtʃi] ‘friend(s)’, but not in cuoco-cuochi [ˈkwɔːko, ˈkwɔːki] `cook(s)’. Krämer (henceforth K) further claims that non-palatalization has much higher type frequency.

K performs a small experiment in which ten adult native speakers are presented with nonce words in the singular and asked to complete sentence which requires them to form the /-i/ plural. Four subjects never palatalized; one palatalized all plurals; and five others produced a mix of the two strategies. Summarizing this result, Krämer (2012:125) concludes: “Thus, in Italian it is a personal decision whether velar palatalization is productive or not.”

I am not sure I agree. The most straightforward interpretation of this data, I think, is that the subjects used a mix of different task models. Some subjects may have been reasoning on whether palatalization is actually productive (a true “grammatical task model”), which for me means that the generalization is encoded (or not encoded, as seems more likely here) so as to apply to arbitrary words. Others may have been guessing based on form similarity to existing words (a “dictionary task model”), and others may have used a mix of the two strategies. It is perhaps not surprising that that adults can make use of the dictionary task model, because one can, with some conscious effort, think of phonemically or semantically related real words, and it’s easy to imagine deciding on whether or not to palatalize a nonce word based on the behavior of similar real words.

I think, unfortunately, that this is an unavoidable problem when wug-testing adults. I submit that the conscious analogizing abilities of adults are probably not relevant to questions of productivity and I think that because I don’t think that’s what productivity is. But I don’t know of any way to prevent adult participants from using a dictionary task model. Thus linguists and reviewers should be more skeptical about the utility of adult wug-tasks.

Schütze (2005) makes a similar point with what we might call wug–rating tasks. In such tasks, speakers are asked to assign a wellformedness rating (e.g., on a Likert scale) to candidate inflected forms of nonce words. Arguably, this setting encourage speakers to adopt a highly permissive variant of the dictionary task model, which might be framed as asking “could such a word ever have such a plural?” An answer to such questions are often interesting to the linguist, but I think it quite distinct from the question of productivity that K and others wish to study.

References

Krämer, M. 2009. The Phonology of Italian. Oxford University Press.
Krämer, M. 2012. Underlying Representations. Cambridge University Press.
Schütze, C. 2005. Thinking about what we are asking speakers to do. In Kepser, S. and Reis, M. (ed.), Linguistic Evidence: Empirical, Theoretical, and Computational Perspectives, pages 457-485. De Gruyter Mouton.

Two conjectures about exceptionality

Kisseberth’s (1970) theory of exceptionality is arguably one of the most expressive yet proposed. Roughly, Kisseberth proposes that for every rule R, every morpheme bears two equipollent features, one indicating whether the morpheme is a potential target (±R Target) and another indicating whether the morpheme is a potential trigger (±R Trigger). R then applies if and only if its structural description is met, when the target morpheme is +R target, and the trigger morpheme is +R Trigger.¹

I conjecture that Inkelas and colleagues’ notion of inalterability as prespecification, as implemented in Logical Phonology (LP), completely eliminates the need for morphemic ±R Target. Rather, particular morphemes’ ability to undergo R can be encoded via underespecification of individual target segments in those morphemes, rendering the segments mutable to feature-filling processes in contrast to fully-specified inalterable segments.² There are at least a few cases—e.g., Turkish ternary voice alternations (Inkelas & Orgun 1995) and k-deletion (Gorman & Reiss in press a), Polish yer deletion (Rubach 2013)—where it seems that target exceptionality cannot be expressed as a morpheme-level property, so we have good reason to prefer the “exceptional segments” of IAP/LP to “exceptional morphemes” with respect to targeting.³

LP generalizes the IAP notion from targets to triggers, using underspecification to render possible triggers quiescent in contrast to fully-specified catalytic segments (see, e.g., Gorman & Reiss in press b). However, I conjecture that a complete theory will still need rules which are triggered in the context of specific morphemes or morphosyntactic contexts.

For example, consider umlaut in Standard German. Umlaut targeting is implemented by leaving o and u (which mutate to ö [ø] and ü [y], respectively) underspecified for Back; some additional complexities are raised by umlauting au and a (which mutate to äu [ɔʏ] and ä [ɛ], respectively). The primary umlaut rule is thus a unification rule which specifies these segments as -Back; separate rules fill in additional details for au and a.

Umlaut triggering is more complex. The triggers are particular suffixes: noun plurals in -er (e.g., Würmer ‘worms’), -e (Nüsse ‘nuts’), and zero (Mütter ‘mothers’), the diminutive -chen (Häuschen ‘little house’), comparatives and superlatives of adjectives (größerer ‘bigger’, am größten ‘biggest’), and 2nd/3rd singular present indicative (du fängst ‘you catch’, er fängt ‘s/he catches’), and a few others. These suffixes have nothing in common morphosyntactically, and exclude related suffixes like noun plural -(e)n or diminutive -lein. And crucially, the triggering suffixes have no common segments on the surface. It is true that many of these suffixes once contained an *i, but many others never did, and Janda (1998) argues umlaut triggering had a morphemic characteristic in even the earliest written German. LP could of course posit these suffixes contain /i/-triggers which never surface—such a grammar is computable, and Bach & King (1970) try to make a proposal of this form work—but Gorman & Reiss (2025) suggest that such analyses are not considered by the language acquisition device (LAD).⁴ Thus we must admit the possibility that umlaut is triggered by specific morphemes, in line with Kisseberth’s ±R Trigger.

A counterexample to the first conjecture would involve some case where targeting must be a morphemic property—what such an example would look like, I don’t know—and a counterexample to the second conjecture would involve an argument that all apparent morphemic triggering is in fact computed within the narrow phonology.

Endnotes

One might imagine that some of these specifications are filled in by redundancy rules. For example, if R is productive (however that’s encoded…), maybe +R target and +R trigger are defaults but the opposite is true if a morpheme lacks the phonological or morphosyntactic properties needed to target and/or trigger R respectively. But Kisseberth doesn’t discuss this matter.
In contrast, when R is a segment deletion rule, a segment targeted by R is fully-specified for reasons we discuss in Gorman & Reiss in press a.
Of course, LP also assumes that children are epistemically bound to provide a narrow phonological analysis (like the IAP pattern), so this does not require further motivation.
Gorman & Reiss (2025) specifically propose a LAD principle no wandering targets; to rule out the /i/-deletion analysis, one would want to generalize that principle from targets to triggers. I see no obstacles to doing so.

References

Bach, E. and King, R. D. 1970. Umlaut in Modern German. Glossa 4:3-21.
Gorman, K. and Reiss, C. 2025. How not to acquire exchange rules in Logical Phonology. In Proceedings of the 2025 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association.
Gorman, K. and Reiss, C. In press a. Natural class reasoning in segment deletion rules. Paper presented at the 56th annual meeting of the North East Linguistic Society, to appear in the proceeedings.
Gorman, K. and Reiss, C. In press b. Metaphony in Substance-Free Logical Phonology. Phonology to appear.
Inkelas, S. and Orgun, C. O. 1995. Level ordering and economy in the lexical phonology of Turkish. Language 71: 763-793.
Janda, R. D. 1998. German umlaut: Morpholexical all the way down from OHG to NHG (Two Stützepunkte for Romance metaphony). Rivista di Linguistica 10: 1563-232.
Kisseberth, C. W. 1970. The treatment of exceptions. Papers in Linguistics 2: 44-58.
Rubach, J. 2013. Exceptional segments in Polish. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 31: 1139-1163.

Get rich quick

Almost four years ago, I started working on an abstract with Charles Reiss arguing that the implicit “feature minimization” approach to specifying phonological rules was unworkable. At last, this work is accepted to appear in a special issue of Glossa under the title “Get rich quick: Why kids don’t need Occam’s Razor” and we have posted a draft to LingBuzz.